Sylvia Plath Quotes

You're going to die. That's going to happen. What matters is what you do with your time before you get flushed out.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

There are some people who don't want to deal with the fact that we are not forever. Some people decide to live life to the fullest.

As an artist, as a person, I don't want to be here for just a little while.

We are not supposed to die until we are empty.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

We're all worm bait waiting to happen. It's what you do while you wait that matters.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

The beginning don't matter. The end don't matter. All that matters is what you do in between...the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet.

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

We're all living on borrowed time. The trick is to come up with works of sufficient interest to pay off the debt.

A termination of one's life is necessary in the scheme of things to provide a logical reason for unselfishness. . . . The fact that there is an end to one's life compels one to take an interest in things that will continue to live after one is dead.

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone?

I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.

Life is wasted on the living.

The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.